6 ms·

Gnome Wayland porting – the endgame

145 points by bkor 12y ago

mindstab 12y ago
For reference, Mir is hoped to be ready for Ubuntu 16.04...
- AceJohnny2 12y ago
  Wait, they're still hanging on to that!?
  - ikt 12y ago
    The ubuntu phone is based on it, so they will be hanging onto it for a while.
    - danieldk 12y ago
      Is there any chance for an actual device? (Except for flashing it onto a Nexus phone?)
      - hansjorg 12y ago
        Coming in early 2015: http://www.pcworld.com/article/2861446/ubuntu-phone-launch-delayed-until-early-2015.html http://www.pcworld.com/article/2861446/ubuntu-phone-launch-d...
- chroma 12y ago
  To be fair, Wayland seems similarly hopeful about shipping in Fedora 23, which is only 4 months before Ubuntu 16.04. Also, Canonical has a big incentive to ship Mir in 16.04, since it's a long term support release. If they don't make it, they'll be forced to support X for an extra 5 years. I think both projects have equally "hopeful" (slim) chances of hitting their dates. If they do ship on time, I expect stability and features to suffer.
  - DonHopkins 12y ago
    I'll take "Suffering Stability and Features" for $500, Alex. As long as I can bet everything on chance to get rid of X 5 years sooner.
  - zurn 12y ago
    They've always said they'll continue supporting X after Mir ships anyway.
- vezzy-fnord 12y ago
  Wayland has been around, I think, at least 3 years before Mir's announcement, though. It's had plenty of time to evolve naturally without any fixed corporate goals necessitating them to act fast.
  - runeks 12y ago
    It's also worth noting that many of the changes required when switching out the display server (moving stuff out of X and into the kernel, adding features to drivers) was done while developing Wayland. Mir doesn't have to worry about this stuff, so they should be able to do it much quicker than the time it has taken Wayland to mature.
    - Already__Taken 12y ago
      It sounds like whatever supersedes waylan should have a much easier time. Hows that for planning.
- sandGorgon 12y ago
  this. I cant seem to find a .deb + bleeding edge Gnome system anywhere. Ubuntu Gnome is what I use right now, but Fedora 22 is so good that it is making me jealous. I would pay money to get a Debian based Gnome distro which is constantly updated. And now that is even more critical as Ubuntu goes off in Mir territory while the rest of the world go to Wayland.
  - eeperson 12y ago
    Debian Testing or Unstable?
    - deleted 12y ago
      [deleted]
    - sandGorgon 12y ago
      I tried to get on the Debian bandwagon, but it is so unfriendly that it is not funny. I know it is built around a philosophy, but I seriously encourage everyone to try out Fedora 21 Workstation to really see what a great Linux experience can feel like.
      - eeperson 12y ago
        Why did you feel it was unfriendly?
bratsche 12y ago
This is great, congratulations and thanks to everyone who's been working on this stuff!
gue5t 12y ago
Does Wayland have an input method story? Last I heard, GNOME was telling users that ibus was the only supported input method for their software; ibus doesn't have the same feature set or flexibility as my current setup, which involves switching between fcitx and XIM dynamically. Plus, what about being able to accessibly enter text into things other than ibus-bound GNOME applications? I've heard talk of a Wayland port of fcitx, but I could never get it to do anything at all, and it sounds like GNOME might not support it even if it does work? I'd love to hear how this all is supposed to work from someone who knows what's going on.
- hyperion2010 12y ago
  Apparently libinput is what is going to handle Wayland input and the X team is already moving to add it as an input option to x11 to ease the transition.
  - gue5t 12y ago
    Libinput is a low-level library that handles and normalizes evdev (kernel) events. "Input methods" here refers to high-level ways of interpreting various devices' events to produce text input for programs that accept text: on-screen keyboards, predictive input, pinyin, and so on.
    - exDM69 12y ago
      Also plain old keyboard input is an important part of this. Dealing with international keyboard layouts is anything but trivial. E.g. to write ñ on my keyboard layout (fi), I need to press AltGr+~ and then n. In X11, this is handled by the XIM library. There's no shortage of applications that do this incorrectly. Particularly annoying are some games which don't get this right. The key for ", ^ and ~ is a "dead" key (doesn't produce any character output, to write ~ you press AltGr+~ and then space) which is where the US keyboard has ]. Lots of games use [] for something important, and this completely fails to work on my key layout. For game keyboard input, the game should use "raw" scan codes (which are keyboard specific) for all configurable keys. Ie. not "keysyms" and especially not character codes. International keyboard handling is very difficult. I was talking about a mostly western key layout, I don't even want to know what it's like to deal with non-western keyboard layouts (russian, greek, chinese, japanese, etc).
thrownaway2424 12y ago
We almost got the old thing half-working, time to switch to the new totally-not-working thing! I love you, free software. Recently I switched from Ubuntu's awful default whatever they call it to plain X11 with every newfangled thing disabled, and fvwm2. My satisfaction with my computer's performance is almost back to where it was in 1998 when my computer had 1% of these resources and for some reason double the performance. I'm definitely not looking forward to the next next thing unless it has a really great performance story incorporating all the lessons that whoever works on this stuff should have learned in the last 20 years.
- mikekchar 12y ago
  Like you I have removed almost everything "Desk Top Environment" recently and have been enjoying the increased resources I get. I similarly hate that everything is getting intertwined so much that it is hard to actually pick and choose applications without taking a huge amount of cruft with it. Having said that, if you look at the list of people working on Wayland it is quite impressive. As it contains a good number of core X windows developers, you would be hard pressed to argue that they don't understand the trade-offs that they are introducing. And while I haven't had time to play with it in any real depth, I've looked at Mutter's API and it is quite nice. Finally, I've actually tried Wayland (with Gnome and on top of Mutter by itself) and while there were still some problems at the time (about 3 months ago), I was actually able to get a full day's work done without much complaint. In fact, it is snappy and responsive and it mostly works. I like exporting my X displays through ssh, so I really don't know if I will use Wayland seriously any time soon, but I think it is a good prospect for people who aren't me. I like the fact that this update from the Gnome guys shows that they are thinking, "Hey maybe not everybody will dump X. Let's try to find a place where we can showcase Wayland with the least inconvenience to conservative people". IMHO, this kind of development is nothing but good. The real question is if Red Hat will take a less heavy hand in deployment of this as opposed to other "Let's reinvent the world" projects. As an option, I'm extremely happy to have it. If it gets wrapped up in everything so that I can't use any popular software without it, then I will be unhappy. But so far I see no signs of that.
  - 12y ago
mst 12y ago
> The login screen is pretty self-contained and we don’t have to worry about application compatibility or support for exotic devices. And we will get Wayland to run on (almost) all systems this way, which should give a lot more exposure and help shake out lingering bugs and hardware issues. Let's test the exciting new technology by making it a dependency of ... being able to log in. I. Um. This seems ... unwise.
- adrianlmm 12y ago
  What do you sugest?
  - renox 12y ago
    The reverse would be wiser: put the login session on Wayland after the Wayland session is stable: if there are bugs in the Wayland session the users could easily use other sessions.. But Fedora devs aren't especially known for caring about the users' pain, remember KDE4.0?
    - bkor 12y ago
      The Wayland session is already available. It just lacks features. That's why the next step is the login manager. Though from reading the latest discussion on fedora-devel, there might be a few complications to correctly automatically fall back to X.
      - renox 12y ago
        > It just lacks features. Does it work on NVidia closed source driver? I thought that this wasn't the case yet..
        bkor 12y ago
        I only learned this recently: Red Hat is working with NVidia, only expected to work around Fedora 23 release. I've switched quite a while ago to the nouveau driver. Next machine will probably have an Intel. I'm waiting for something which is quiet, doesn't use too much power and can drive an Ultra HD monitor at 60fps without any hacks (seems to require HDMI 2.0).
drv 12y ago
How is XWayland doing these days? Last time I heard anything about it, it sounded like GLX programs didn't work yet, which would be a major impediment to switching fully to Wayland. Lots of older programs (especially games) won't ever be ported to use the new Wayland APIs, so compatibility is important.
Zardoz84 12y ago
QT 5 supoorts Wayland. these "maybe" is false.
- bkor 12y ago
  You're reading too much into it. GTK+3.x has supported Wayland for various versions already. Fully supporting everything required changes (additions) to Wayland (the spec). There's still a few things missing in Wayland for GTK+ to support everything. Qt support, we're (=GNOME) not the ones to know. Aside from that, this bit is probably about if we set environment variables to prefer/force Wayland backend, or leave it up to toolkits to discover. For GNOME to change behaviour of Qt might not be a good idea (or maybe it is :-P). As such, "maybe".

145 points by bkor 12y ago

mindstab 12y ago

For reference, Mir is hoped to be ready for Ubuntu 16.04...

AceJohnny2 12y ago
Wait, they're still hanging on to that!?
- ikt 12y ago
  The ubuntu phone is based on it, so they will be hanging onto it for a while.
  - danieldk 12y ago
    Is there any chance for an actual device? (Except for flashing it onto a Nexus phone?)
    - hansjorg 12y ago
      Coming in early 2015: http://www.pcworld.com/article/2861446/ubuntu-phone-launch-delayed-until-early-2015.html http://www.pcworld.com/article/2861446/ubuntu-phone-launch-d...
chroma 12y ago
To be fair, Wayland seems similarly hopeful about shipping in Fedora 23, which is only 4 months before Ubuntu 16.04. Also, Canonical has a big incentive to ship Mir in 16.04, since it's a long term support release. If they don't make it, they'll be forced to support X for an extra 5 years. I think both projects have equally "hopeful" (slim) chances of hitting their dates. If they do ship on time, I expect stability and features to suffer.
- DonHopkins 12y ago
  I'll take "Suffering Stability and Features" for $500, Alex. As long as I can bet everything on chance to get rid of X 5 years sooner.
- zurn 12y ago
  They've always said they'll continue supporting X after Mir ships anyway.
vezzy-fnord 12y ago
Wayland has been around, I think, at least 3 years before Mir's announcement, though. It's had plenty of time to evolve naturally without any fixed corporate goals necessitating them to act fast.
- runeks 12y ago
  It's also worth noting that many of the changes required when switching out the display server (moving stuff out of X and into the kernel, adding features to drivers) was done while developing Wayland. Mir doesn't have to worry about this stuff, so they should be able to do it much quicker than the time it has taken Wayland to mature.
  - Already__Taken 12y ago
    It sounds like whatever supersedes waylan should have a much easier time. Hows that for planning.
sandGorgon 12y ago
this. I cant seem to find a .deb + bleeding edge Gnome system anywhere. Ubuntu Gnome is what I use right now, but Fedora 22 is so good that it is making me jealous. I would pay money to get a Debian based Gnome distro which is constantly updated. And now that is even more critical as Ubuntu goes off in Mir territory while the rest of the world go to Wayland.
- eeperson 12y ago
  Debian Testing or Unstable?
  - deleted 12y ago
    [deleted]
  - sandGorgon 12y ago
    I tried to get on the Debian bandwagon, but it is so unfriendly that it is not funny. I know it is built around a philosophy, but I seriously encourage everyone to try out Fedora 21 Workstation to really see what a great Linux experience can feel like.
    - eeperson 12y ago
      Why did you feel it was unfriendly?

bratsche 12y ago

This is great, congratulations and thanks to everyone who's been working on this stuff!

gue5t 12y ago

Does Wayland have an input method story? Last I heard, GNOME was telling users that ibus was the only supported input method for their software; ibus doesn't have the same feature set or flexibility as my current setup, which involves switching between fcitx and XIM dynamically. Plus, what about being able to accessibly enter text into things other than ibus-bound GNOME applications? I've heard talk of a Wayland port of fcitx, but I could never get it to do anything at all, and it sounds like GNOME might not support it even if it does work? I'd love to hear how this all is supposed to work from someone who knows what's going on.

hyperion2010 12y ago
Apparently libinput is what is going to handle Wayland input and the X team is already moving to add it as an input option to x11 to ease the transition.
- gue5t 12y ago
  Libinput is a low-level library that handles and normalizes evdev (kernel) events. "Input methods" here refers to high-level ways of interpreting various devices' events to produce text input for programs that accept text: on-screen keyboards, predictive input, pinyin, and so on.
  - exDM69 12y ago
    Also plain old keyboard input is an important part of this. Dealing with international keyboard layouts is anything but trivial. E.g. to write ñ on my keyboard layout (fi), I need to press AltGr+~ and then n. In X11, this is handled by the XIM library. There's no shortage of applications that do this incorrectly. Particularly annoying are some games which don't get this right. The key for ", ^ and ~ is a "dead" key (doesn't produce any character output, to write ~ you press AltGr+~ and then space) which is where the US keyboard has ]. Lots of games use [] for something important, and this completely fails to work on my key layout. For game keyboard input, the game should use "raw" scan codes (which are keyboard specific) for all configurable keys. Ie. not "keysyms" and especially not character codes. International keyboard handling is very difficult. I was talking about a mostly western key layout, I don't even want to know what it's like to deal with non-western keyboard layouts (russian, greek, chinese, japanese, etc).

thrownaway2424 12y ago

We almost got the old thing half-working, time to switch to the new totally-not-working thing! I love you, free software. Recently I switched from Ubuntu's awful default whatever they call it to plain X11 with every newfangled thing disabled, and fvwm2. My satisfaction with my computer's performance is almost back to where it was in 1998 when my computer had 1% of these resources and for some reason double the performance. I'm definitely not looking forward to the next next thing unless it has a really great performance story incorporating all the lessons that whoever works on this stuff should have learned in the last 20 years.

mikekchar 12y ago
Like you I have removed almost everything "Desk Top Environment" recently and have been enjoying the increased resources I get. I similarly hate that everything is getting intertwined so much that it is hard to actually pick and choose applications without taking a huge amount of cruft with it. Having said that, if you look at the list of people working on Wayland it is quite impressive. As it contains a good number of core X windows developers, you would be hard pressed to argue that they don't understand the trade-offs that they are introducing. And while I haven't had time to play with it in any real depth, I've looked at Mutter's API and it is quite nice. Finally, I've actually tried Wayland (with Gnome and on top of Mutter by itself) and while there were still some problems at the time (about 3 months ago), I was actually able to get a full day's work done without much complaint. In fact, it is snappy and responsive and it mostly works. I like exporting my X displays through ssh, so I really don't know if I will use Wayland seriously any time soon, but I think it is a good prospect for people who aren't me. I like the fact that this update from the Gnome guys shows that they are thinking, "Hey maybe not everybody will dump X. Let's try to find a place where we can showcase Wayland with the least inconvenience to conservative people". IMHO, this kind of development is nothing but good. The real question is if Red Hat will take a less heavy hand in deployment of this as opposed to other "Let's reinvent the world" projects. As an option, I'm extremely happy to have it. If it gets wrapped up in everything so that I can't use any popular software without it, then I will be unhappy. But so far I see no signs of that.
- 12y ago

mst 12y ago

> The login screen is pretty self-contained and we don’t have to worry about application compatibility or support for exotic devices. And we will get Wayland to run on (almost) all systems this way, which should give a lot more exposure and help shake out lingering bugs and hardware issues. Let's test the exciting new technology by making it a dependency of ... being able to log in. I. Um. This seems ... unwise.

adrianlmm 12y ago
What do you sugest?
- renox 12y ago
  The reverse would be wiser: put the login session on Wayland after the Wayland session is stable: if there are bugs in the Wayland session the users could easily use other sessions.. But Fedora devs aren't especially known for caring about the users' pain, remember KDE4.0?
  - bkor 12y ago
    The Wayland session is already available. It just lacks features. That's why the next step is the login manager. Though from reading the latest discussion on fedora-devel, there might be a few complications to correctly automatically fall back to X.
    - renox 12y ago
      > It just lacks features. Does it work on NVidia closed source driver? I thought that this wasn't the case yet..
      - bkor 12y ago
        I only learned this recently: Red Hat is working with NVidia, only expected to work around Fedora 23 release. I've switched quite a while ago to the nouveau driver. Next machine will probably have an Intel. I'm waiting for something which is quiet, doesn't use too much power and can drive an Ultra HD monitor at 60fps without any hacks (seems to require HDMI 2.0).

drv 12y ago

How is XWayland doing these days? Last time I heard anything about it, it sounded like GLX programs didn't work yet, which would be a major impediment to switching fully to Wayland. Lots of older programs (especially games) won't ever be ported to use the new Wayland APIs, so compatibility is important.

Zardoz84 12y ago

QT 5 supoorts Wayland. these "maybe" is false.

bkor 12y ago
You're reading too much into it. GTK+3.x has supported Wayland for various versions already. Fully supporting everything required changes (additions) to Wayland (the spec). There's still a few things missing in Wayland for GTK+ to support everything. Qt support, we're (=GNOME) not the ones to know. Aside from that, this bit is probably about if we set environment variables to prefer/force Wayland backend, or leave it up to toolkits to discover. For GNOME to change behaviour of Qt might not be a good idea (or maybe it is :-P). As such, "maybe".